


The Lightning

by thepointoftheneedle



Category: Riverdale (TV 2017)
Genre: Enemies to Lovers, F/M, Italian AU, Journalist Jughead Jones, Light Angst, Smut
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-06-07
Updated: 2020-06-10
Packaged: 2021-03-03 19:49:00
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 4
Words: 19,439
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24591097
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/thepointoftheneedle/pseuds/thepointoftheneedle
Summary: Betty is hiding out in Italy, writing a blog about hiking and mozzarella when investigative reporter Jughead Jones tracks her down.  She didn't want to be found and she's mad as hell about it. He doesn't want to let this story get away from him. There's some smut, there are the villages of the Sabine Hills, there's villainous Chic, there's a poem in Italian.
Relationships: Betty Cooper/Jughead Jones
Comments: 142
Kudos: 182
Collections: 7th Bughead Fanfiction Awards - Nominees





	1. Beauty Awakens the Soul to Act (Dante)

**Author's Note:**

> I think I've made the Italian pretty clear by context but I'm still learning so if anything is wrong please let me know (other than Jug's Italian being a little clunky which is intentional.) Cedrata is a sweet, sour fizzy soft drink that is easy to find in Italy but isn't available where I live and which I'm longing for.

Jug leaned against the bike just outside the cemetery gate, Baltimore drizzle coalescing into rain now. The sky was pale, the paths and lawns dusted with frost, the marble grave markers barely delineated from the desaturated tones of their surroundings. He pulled his hat further over his ears, lit another cigarette and thought about Italy with such intensity that he could almost taste the cedrata, almost feel the blaze of the sun on the back of his neck, almost feel the softness of her breasts beneath his fingers.

He had arrived in the hillside village an hour from Rome just as twilight sank into darkness, exhausted and sick of the road. There was an illuminated sign that said “Hotel” and he pulled into a stony parking lot and pushed down the bike’s kickstand. He was too tired to concern himself with the quality of the accommodation; he could have slept standing up. However once he’d shouldered open the heavy, studded wooden door he found himself in a pristine, tiled entryway fragrant with fruit and flowers. Roses possibly, he thought, his writer’s mind registering details that would bring the world to life for a reader. The reception desk was unstaffed but, when he pressed the bell, a boy of sixteen or seventeen quickly appeared from a room at the rear. Jug took a deep preparatory breath and grappled his way through “Buonosera, verrai una camera per un… settimane per favore.”

“Certainly sir. A single?” The boy had taken up a pen and was reaching for a check in form. Jug was a little crestfallen that his pronunciation was obviously so conspicuous that he’d been pegged as an American as soon as he spoke. The boy clearly had no faith in his ability to get any further in their conversation in Italian and had answered in perfect if accented English before the guest inflicted any more brutality on the language of Dante. 

“Sí una stanza singola,” he replied stubbornly and immediately felt like a dick. “Thanks. Can I get anything to eat? I know it’s late.”

“The kitchen is closed but I can make you sandwiches if you wish. Some fruit?”

“Grazie, that’d be great. Anything. It’s been a long journey.”

“Please fill this in and I’ll need your passport. From the United States? Today?”

“Yeah, travelling since four this morning.” He filled in his details in his slanting, spiky handwriting and pushed it across the desk with his passport. “Thanks.”

“This way signore. Your Italian is good by the way, a good accent. I just like to practise my English. For school. I’m Giorgio.”

“Piacere di conoscerti Giorgio. I’m Jughead.” The boy looked confused. “It’s a nickname. I don’t know what that is in Italian.”

“Ah, soprannome. I’m pleased to meet you too, Jughead. Here you are, number fourteen. I will bring your food in a few minutes.”

Jug handed the boy a ten Euro note and fell back onto the bed as soon as he had closed the door. He mustn’t close his eyes or the promised panino e frutta would go to waste so he dragged his backpack up onto the quilt and rummaged through its contents for his notebook to review his research. 

It was a baroque kind of story. There was a woman who might be a plucky ingenue or possibly a manipulative, homicidal sociopath. There was a male protagonist who either met a tragic end, victim to a hideous dissection of his personality by the twitterati or who received a kind of rough justice. Jug had to find the girl, look into her eyes and see if she was victim or perpetrator. Of course after the whole thing had gone down she had turned into the French Lieutenant’s Woman, disappeared into obscurity, fled. He would find her, wherever she was hiding and he would examine her. Once, on assignment in Vietnam, he’d been served snails for his dinner. He was pretty fearless about food, prepared to try anything but the snails had given him a nasty moment. Still his local guide had shown him how to pull them from their shells with the safety pin that sat on the plate next to them and they actually tasted great, a little chewy like calamari, salty, spicy, sour and delicious. He often thought about the satisfaction of pulling the whole thing from the shell impaled on the spike of the pin and how much that resembled the satisfaction he got from getting to the root of an interviewee’s character, pinning them down. He would see the woman tomorrow and he would pull her from her shell on the point of a pin, the better to examine her. She could writhe and wriggle but she wouldn’t get free until he was sure he understood her.

Giorgio brought his supper and wished him buonanotte. Before he could leave Jug asked if he knew an American woman in town. He was hoping to meet with her. Giorgio looked at him suspiciously. “Una donna Americana? Non la conosco, Spiacente signore. Dormi bene.” Jug thought that it was a little weird to suddenly revert to Italian for the exchange but the kid said he didn’t know her not that she wasn’t in town. He’d tracked her here. He was sure he had it right. 

The next day he wandered downstairs following the sound of chinking glassware to a breakfast room where la colazione was laid out. One advantage of working a story in Italy was the ease with which a hack could access great coffee and he, for one, wasn’t planning to pass up that perk. He ordered a ristretto and when the waitress brought it he took it out through open French doors to stand on a terrace where he could sip it while he smoked a cigarette. He was on his second coffee when a man in a suit approached. “Buongiorno Signore Jones. I welcome you to my hotel. I am Matteo Vacone. I hope my son made you welcome.”

“Buongiorno signore. Yes Giorgio was very helpful. He makes a great sandwich.”

“You will stay for a week?”  
“That’s the plan. I’m here on business. I need to find an American woman who is living somewhere near here. Maybe you can help?”

“Ah signore, spiacente. In Italy we value our privacy. Perhaps this American woman is not happy to receive visitors? Perhaps she wishes to live quietly and be left alone? But there are many beautiful villages to explore, you could take a walk, enjoy the scenery, relax.”

“Thank you signore but we all have our work. Mine, sadly, is to inconvenience your neighbour with my presence, é cosi.”

“Indeed. Well enjoy your breakfast signore. We have a fine restaurant if you wish to do better for your dinner than Giorgio’s panini this evening.” Jug had the feeling that Matteo’s polite rebuff had come from another source, perhaps from la donna Americana herself. But he was an award winning investigative journalist, he could certainly find her without any help in this tiny place. He went inside to do justice to the cold meats, cheese and fruit on offer before he set out to ruin her day.

It took almost no time when allowances were made for his rusty Italian. He went to the bar on the main street where a trio of old guys were standing at the counter, sipping their caffé and chatting. He ordered yet another coffee as a social lubricant and wished them good morning. He dove into the linguistic fray. “I’m looking for a friend here in town, un’ amica qui, una Americana. She’s called Elizabeth, lei ha chiamento Elizabeth. Young, blonde, umm giovane…capelli bionde. Dove vive lei? Do you know where she lives?”

“Ah la bella donna Americana!” they laughed. “Cosa vuole da lei?” What did he want from her? He struggled with their accents, their idiom and the fact that they chortled as they spoke. Eventually he worked out that she lived in the hills behind the village, there didn’t even seem to be an address, just “the house with the blue door on the path to Acquasparta.” He thanked them and paid for their coffee along with his and, as he left, one of them called after him, “Hai voluto la bicicletta? E adesso pedala!” He puzzled it out as he began his walk “You wanted the bicycle, now you have to pedal it.” Maybe it meant that he had made his bed and he’d have to lie in it, something like that anyway.

The hills were pretty steep and it was already getting hot when he left town. He regretted not being better equipped for a hike, water, at least, would have been wise. He was sweating, pushing his damp hair back from his forehead, and cursing by the time he spotted a small house with a blue door, held ajar with a rock, just off the path. He noticed a stream alongside the building and he decided to make himself a little more comfortable before he knocked at the door. He knelt on the bank and scooped up the icy water and threw it back over his head, shaking himself like a dog as the rivulets cascaded down his back, the cold making him shiver in its contrast to the scalding heat of the sun. He took a few mouthfuls of the water and wished he had brought a bottle to fill for the return journey. When he turned back towards the house he saw that a woman was standing, leaning on the doorframe watching him. She held a broom of a type that he’d only seen in story books, straw attached with twine to a wooden handle. He stood, brushing dust and dried grass from his jeans, and walked towards her. “Elizabeth Cooper? I’m Jughead Jones. I emailed.”

She stared at him for a moment and then in rapid Italian she said “Spiacente signore, non parlo inglese.” She stepped backwards into the shade of the house and slammed the door. A half decent investigative reporter never lets a door slam on them and Jug was better than half decent. His army booted foot was between the doorjamb and the closing slab of oak in plenty of time to arrest it in its progress.

“Elizabeth, Elizabeth really. That’s not going to work. I’ve seen your photograph. Your hair is different but I know it’s you. Just talk to me for an hour or so, give me your story and I’ll be gone. Otherwise I’m just going to be lurking about making a nuisance of myself. Much better to make a friend of me. I don’t give up.”

“What part of my reply to your email was confusing to you Jones? Was it the part where I said that I had nothing to say to you or the part where I told you I’d call my lawyer if you made any attempt to contact me again? Or maybe it was when I suggested that you consider the life choices that have led you to be an intrusive, low-life, dirt ditching bottom feeder?” As she said this she swiped at his feet with the broom, as if trying to sweep out a bug or a lizard that was infesting her home. She caught his feet and then rapped the broomstick painfully against his ankles.

“Ouch. Look you’ve got the wrong idea totally. I’m not a tabloid hack. I’ve written for The New Yorker, for Time, the Manchester Guardian, the New York Times. I can show you some of my work. I’m not trying to write some terrible character assassination. I’m here on my own dime. I want to write a book about cases like yours.”

“There are no cases like mine. It’s my story. Get your grubby paws off it and get back to whichever rock you crawled out from under. Get off my goddamn property. Off, off.” She was swiping higher with the broom now and he took a startled step back to avoid contact with his eyes and she slammed the door closed in his face. Well, he thought, that went well. He sat on the side of the path under the shade of a fig tree trying to work out his next move. He needed her story; it was going to be the central part of the book that he was planning on literary scandals. This one had a death so it was the most dramatic. The others that he planned to write about, Paul Smaïl, Danny Santiago, Lobsang Rampa were well known, interesting mainly in providing a context. He absolutely couldn’t give up. 

As he pondered a familiar figure appeared on the path, cresting the hill to the house. Giorgio, who apparently didn’t know the American woman. He had the good grace to look a little embarrassed. “Ciao Signore Jones.”

“Ciao Giorgio. Friend of yours?” He nodded towards the house.

“Signorina Betty helps me with my English after school. I would like to attend the university to study English. It is important to have a good accent. You have spoken with her?” He looked anxious. 

“Did you tell her I asked about her?” He nodded and looked at the ground. 

“I texted last night. I said that you had checked in, that you were coming to see her. I gave your name. That was wrong. My father would be angry. The guest book is confidential.”

“No, she’s a friend of yours. I would have done exactly the same. Look, you go and have your lesson. I’m heading back now. She’s wrong about me. She thinks I’m a gossipmonger but I’m really not.”

“I’m sorry I don’t know this word. Goss…”

“Gossipmonger. I don’t know it in Italian.”

“Il malalingua,” a voice came from an upstairs window, either a translation or an accusation. “Are you coming in Giorgio or are you planning to spend your time talking with strange men in the street, come un teppista?”

“Ciao Signore Jones,” Giorgio muttered, so utterly not the hooligan that she accused him of being and turning towards the door which soon opened to admit him and then slammed shut again. Jug wandered back down the hill in the scorching heat, feeling his neck burning and beads of sweat running down his back. The worst part of it, well apart from the bruise on his ankle from the broom, was that she was an extraordinarily beautiful girl. Clearly with anger issues, borderline unhinged, but extremely attractive. The cut-off jeans and sleeveless top hadn’t hurt, the sight of the honeyed skin on her long limbs was hard to disparage. The blonde hair piled carelessly on top of her head, strands loose around her face, was something of an Achilles heel for him. He liked blondes. It was so obvious, so unsubtle a preference that he was ashamed of it but the heart wants what the heart wants. Although he wasn’t so sure that his heart was involved in the choice. Still, it was her eyes that he kept thinking about on that long walk, they were huge and clear and bright. The green of them was the green of the hillsides that surrounded him, fresh but sun warmed. He wasn’t normally this susceptible to a pretty girl, especially not one who had attacked him with her witchy broomstick. Perhaps it was the heat.

He got back to his room in the hotel and lay on the bed in a towel after a shower to recover from the day’s exertions. He knew she would have blocked his email address after their last abortive contact so he couldn’t send her samples of his work. Still he selected some articles that he had written over the last five years including the one for which he had been awarded the Goldsmith prize. It was a damn good piece about the conditions faced by ICE detainees. Maybe he could get Giorgio to pass them to her. He needed to get the kid onside if he was going to agree to that, especially since he clearly had quite a crush on la bella donna. What did teenage boys like? Scratch that, what did teenage boys like, that he could supply? He had the answer immediately.

Fortunately Giorgio was his waiter at dinner. When he suggested that the kid might like to learn to ride a motorcycle on his way up to Signorina Betty’s next time, he could see the same desire in his eyes that he had had himself when he acquired a bike for the first time. To a young man a motorcycle represented a kind of reckless freedom that was endlessly appealing. “Not on the road Giorgio. Only on the path and you have to wear a helmet and listen to what I tell you, or the deal’s off. OK?

“Sì signore.”

“And in return you agree to give her some papers from me.” The kid looked suspicious. “Just samples of my work for her to look at. You just take them to her. She can tear them up if she wants. Deal?” He was going to rely on her curiosity to reel her in. They arranged to meet the next afternoon after Giorgio finished school and Jug fell ravenously on his dinner, feeling optimistic again.

It was understandable that he would dream about her. She was on his mind, because of the book. It certainly didn’t mean anything. Even the fact that in his dream she was on the hillside, by the stream, her long hair loose over her naked skin in the moonlight was purely a biological phenomenon. It didn’t mean a thing. It had just been a while since he had been with a girl. Getting finished with the Mexico story, getting a publisher interested in the book and then organising Archie’s bachelor party had taken all his attention recently and so he was lonely for some female companionship. His libido had simply snagged onto the first available female stimulus. Nothing more to it than that.

The next day he ordered his notes, used the hotel printer to make hard copies of his stories and was waiting for Giorgio at two in the afternoon, leaning on the bike, at the bottom of the hill path. He’d come better equipped this time, wearing a tank top instead of a shirt, his messenger bag containing his printouts, his army surplus water canteen and his leather jacket. Giorgio was carrying a backpack which Jug took from him in exchange for the bike helmet that was hooked over his arm. He ran through the basics with him before passing him the jacket and making sure he’d put the helmet on securely. He made sure the kid understood that the bike would go where he was looking, and if that happened to be the ground, things would go badly. He let the kid have a try, smiling at his wobbly but safe progress as he trotted alongside. There were a couple of tense moments when the wobbling threatened to become catastrophic but Jug managed to get a shoulder against the boy to keep him upright, just in time. Jug explained the shifter, let him go a little faster, and teased him when the boy winced at the pain it inflicted on his feet through his sneakers. “You need boots kid. The tougher the better. It’ll take longer for you to break your ankle, though if you decide to get a bike you’ll probably break one eventually. Goes with the territory.” As all novices do, he managed to burn himself on the exhaust as he got off near the house with the blue door. Jug was glad he had avoided any major damage to the machine; he hoped to sell the bike for a similar price to the one he had paid an ex colleague for it in Rome when he arrived. If the woman read the articles the risk would have been worth it.

As Giorgio inspected the burn on his calf and Jug laughingly rolled up the leg of his jeans to show him the scars he had acquired from the same mistake she came tearing out of the house and started yelling. “Oh, tell me you didn’t let this child ride that death trap up here. You are certifiably insane. Giorgio, wait until I tell your father what you’ve been doing.”

Giorgio howled “Non sono un bambino!” his tone somewhat contradicting himself.

Jughead laughed as he echoed the sentiment, “He’s not a baby. I was looking out for him. He’s fine.” She couldn’t have established a more immediate and powerful bond between two men than to allow one to defend the other’s agency. 

Then she noticed that Giorgio had a burn to his leg. “Oh my god Georgie, you’re hurt. Let me get some cold water on that. So irresponsible. Unbelievable.”

“It’s nothing. Stop fussing. He’s not even in pain. Are you ‘Georgie?’” He used the babyish pet name with such sarcasm that Giorgio immediately shook his head, shrugged his shoulders and claimed to be fine. 

“Toxic masculinity much Jones? Do you plan to take him to a strip club and give him a cigarette next?” Unable to resist it he took his pack of Marlboro from his pocket and offered them to the boy who actually reached for it until he swept it away laughing.

“Giorgio, my man, you are way too smart for that. But let’s take the bike to Rome and pick up chicks.” He was enjoying himself now. Her outrage was entertaining. And hot. Her eyes flashed, her cheeks were flushed, Christ, she was even breathing hard. He couldn’t claim to be unaffected.

“You are not taking this young man anywhere. God knows what sort of depravity you’d lead him into. Don’t either of you imagine for a second that I won’t be talking to Matteo this evening.”

“Signorina, per favore,” Giorgio wheedled. “My father will be too busy this evening. He has many guests at the restaurant. Please don’t bother him with this. I won’t go to pick up chickens with Signore Jones. I promise.”

“Kid, you say chicks, not chickens, non sono polli,” Jug laughed.

“Giorgio, you never refer to women as chicks. It immediately tells a girl that you are a total douche,” noticing his confusion she gave an alternative “a testa di minchia. Oh my God you have to keep away from this man.”

“Easy way to achieve that Cooper. You give me an interview and I’ll be gone, out of town in no time at all. It’d definitely be the best way to protect ‘Georgie’ from my malign influence. Otherwise me and my pal Gio will be hitting the clubs. Right, my brother?” Giorgio was loving the attention of the cool American and he nodded enthusiastically.

“You wouldn’t dare. Stop manipulating this child right now. He’s a good boy.” She was getting really mad now. He thought he might almost be there. Just a little more disruption.

“Are you Gio? Are you a good boy? He’s not a child Cooper, he’s a young man, and if you think he’s just here to improve his accent you’re dumber than you seem.” 

Giorgio flushed scarlet but then stuck his chin out defiantly. “ Non sono un ragazzi, sono un uomo.” Even Jughead was moved. He remembered when he would have made the same kind of claim, his dad trying to keep him out of a gang and him saying “I’m not a kid anymore. I’m a man now. You can’t stop me. I know what I’m doing.” And of course his dad, behind bars, couldn’t stop him from almost ruining his life. He thought it was ironic that the certainty he felt about his own decisions had declined with every year he stayed alive until now he acknowledged that he was pretty clueless almost all the time. 

The colour fell from her cheeks as she realised what had been obvious to Jug from the first time he had spoken to Giorgio about la donna Americana. “Jones, you can’t just walk into people’s lives and cause chaos. You’re like a tornado or something. If I talk to you for an hour will you just get out of town right away and never come back?”

“Nope.” He had the advantage and he was going to press it as far as it would go.

“What the hell do you want then?” 

“Give me a day. Tell me your story in your own words. I want to understand it so I can write it properly.”

“It’s my story. I might want to write it myself.”

“It’s been four years Cooper. If you were going to tell it you’d have done it by now. But you haven’t. You’ve been hiding out here in the Sabine Hills writing a blog about mozzarella and wild thyme and hiking. I can do this for you.”

“Give me story approval.”

“No. I don’t do that. I’ll write it as I see it. Look, read these. You’ll see who I am from them. My number’s at the top.” He thrust the pages into her hands and to his surprise she took them. 

“Fine. If you’d agreed to that I’d know you were a hack for sure. I might read them. I make no promises. Now get lost. Giorgio, come on, your lesson.”

After she disappeared behind the blue door with Giorgio for what would, no doubt, be an uncomfortable lesson, he got on the bike and rode back down the path, skidding a little on the loose surface and enjoying the lurch in his stomach when the wheels almost slid out from under him. He liked that feeling of struggling to be in charge, riding the razor’s edge between chaos and control, only his own strength to rely upon. It was the kind of excitement that he had first experienced with the Serpents and that he sought these days reporting from war zones or travelling on the death train through Mexico with migrants. He reasoned that there were worse ways that he could get the buzz he needed than by exposing injustices and corruption to the news hungry public. In college, surrounded by dry assignments, theories to learn and weighty tomes to read he had been seriously tempted by hard liquor and narcotics but he’d managed to steer a course away from them with the judicious use of motorcycles and the occasional bar fight. If he’d faced a lifetime of desk jobs and suburbia he would definitely have succumbed long ago. He’d have become the HR guy tweaked out on H or a keyboard clerk on ketamine. Instead he was the author hooked on adrenaline, a correspondent on caffeine, a scribbler jonesing for stress. He was still giggling at his own jokes at he pulled into the parking lot behind the hotel.

She called at eleven that night, as he stood on the balcony of his room smoking a cigarette. There was no polite small talk. “Be here at seven tomorrow. I mean seven in the morning. We’ll hike. I don’t want to look at you when I tell it. In fact I don’t want to look at you at all.” She’d hung up before he could even agree.


	2. Here begins a new life

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> A hike, a poem, a story.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The chapter titles are all from Dante- In quella parte del libro de la mia memoria... si trova una rubrica la quale dice: Incipit vita nova. ("In that part of the book of my memory, before which is little that can be read, there is a rubric, saying, 'here beginneth the new life.'

He must have closed his eyes for a second, lost in his recollection of the Italian summer, because he heard the footsteps before he saw anyone. He looked up to see an older woman walking towards the grave, grey wool coat belted tightly against the cold, a posy of ivory and dusty pink flowers wilting in her hands. She stopped and he gave her a moment to clear away some older stems, sludgy in the vase. She picked up some windblown petals and used a handkerchief to wipe over the marble of the headstone. As she stood and wiped her hands with the same handkerchief he walked over to her. “Ms McCleod? I’m so sorry to bother you here. My name’s Jones. I’d like to talk to you about your son. About Charles. I’m writing a book.”

It had taken him a while to find where Charles was buried. His false names and the confusing plethora of origin stories had obfuscated his final resting place, but once he persuaded his publisher to take Charles’ literary agent out for a well lubricated lunch and obtain the name on his royalty checks it had been relatively simple to track down the cemetery. He had found the grave, noted the date of birth, seen that there were flowers by the headstone and decided to come back and wait, a few weeks later, on this very particular date. 

She looked at him. The sadness and loss in her eyes was heartbreaking. “No-one mentions him to me anymore. No-one even says his name. I guess they think it was my fault, that I raised him wrong. I did my best you know. It would have been his thirtieth birthday today. But he’s gone and his father is gone and there’s just me left to put flowers on their graves.”

“They’re lovely.” Jug motioned to the flowers. “It’s hard to find anything in bloom in January.”

“Hellebores. They symbolise a scandal you know. Seems appropriate really.”

“Can I buy you a cup of coffee? I won’t take up too much of your time.”

“I guess so. I have nothing else to do.”

That morning in Italy, the morning that he was going to hear Elizabeth Cooper’s story he couldn’t face breakfast at 6.15 so he made do with a caffe lungo and a cigarette before setting off up the hill, remembering to grab his water bottle before he left. She’d looked pretty fit and he’d read the blogs about the two day mountain hike that she made, following the footsteps of St Francis walking to Rome from Assisi and her trek to the abbeys in Farfa. He didn’t imagine that she would tolerate too much dawdling from him so he steeled himself for a tiring day. It wasn’t that he was unable to face a physical challenge but he preferred to do his interviewing sitting down with his notebook at his side, noticing the visual cues that suggested someone was trying to dissemble or deflect.

When he arrived she was already waiting for him outside the blue door. He was a little disappointed. He’d hoped for a glimpse inside the sanctum sanctorum. Her blog included artful photographs of sliced, soft, white fleshed local peaches on a scrubbed wooden table and bunches of herbs drying above a black iron stove but he wanted to see her environment unmediated, to get a sense of how she really lived, alone up here in these deserted hills. He suspected that another aspect of the hiking plan was to avoid exactly that degree of intimacy. “Ready Jones? We’re going to Casperia first. It’s only an hour or so. Well normally it is for me. With you along who can tell?” 

He decided not to rise to the bait but to simply allow the barb to lay where she had thrown it. No point antagonising her further now that he’d got what he wanted, especially since she could just choose to abandon him in some Italian wilderness to be eaten by wolves or bears or whatever the hell the local predators were. She led the way behind the house and they started uphill over a chalky track surrounded by already fragrant wild thyme and huge dry thistles, their down blowing around them on a light morning breeze. “So Cooper, your story. How do you want to tell it? Shall I ask questions or do you just want to start in?”

“Tell me what you think you know Jones. I’ll correct you after you go wrong. Because you will. No-one knows what really happened except me and Chic. And he’s not talking ever again.”

“OK, so your brother, Charles, wrote a book about his childhood. What my publisher would call misery porn. Abandonment, abuse, drugs, violence, horror upon horror. Then he finds his birth family and the reader imagines they’re going to get a redemptive arc but no. The suburban normalcy is a fake out. Twist, it’s more horror. Positively Lynchian. The sister, you, draws him reluctantly into sex work, threatens to set fire to him as he sleeps, the mother is a controlling sociopath who murders a friend who is trying to help him and then plans to frame him.” 

This drew a wry, bitter laugh from her and he stopped. “No, carry on. It’s fascinating to see what people think happened.”

“OK so, the book’s a best seller despite the suspicion that the trauma of this white guy is just a standard Wednesday for a lot of people, the economically disadvantaged, women of colour or trans folks. Still, he’s a big noise. He does a speaking tour and even gets on some of those podcasts and talk shows where they like to dissect people’s mental health struggles as entertainment. He makes dark hints that the book is the tip of a scary iceberg. The mother gets arrested for suspected homicide. Then the sister starts to claim he’s making it all up, he’s a fraud, it’s fiction. He makes counter allegations about the sister’s violent and murderous intentions and how it’s exacerbating his PTSD, he fears for his life. There’s a social media storm. Some people claim the sister is a psychopath. There are allegations of victim blaming, of heteronormative fascism because Charles is a gay man. Others claim that Charles is a monster who has fabricated stories before for attention, for revenge and even just for amusement. All kinds of low life types crawl out of the woodwork with allegations and counter allegations. Then, at the height of the hysteria Charles turns up dead in a Chicago hotel room, maybe it’s an overdose, maybe it’s homicide. People make claims that the sister killed him, she’s a murderer like her mother, other people claim that he was always a junkie and it was just a matter of time before his habit killed him. The sister is questioned but there are no charges, the mother’s released and goes to ground somewhere and then the sister disappears too, just gone. Until this brilliant investigator tracks down a blog by some lonely American girl, all reclusive in the Sabine Hills and he puts it together. And here we are.” He got to the end of the summary as fast as he could because the steepness of the climb and the pace that she was setting were robbing him of spare oxygen. As he finished his narrative he was gasping a little and there seemed to be a wheeze in his lungs that spoke to a fairly dedicated ten year smoking habit.

“Fine, so that’s pretty much totally wrong. Except the recluse in Sabina part. Do you think I killed him?”

“Well I hope not. If you’re capable of that then I made a pretty big mistake coming out here with you where no-one would even find my body if you made away with me.”

She looked back at him seriously for a moment. “I’m never sure about all that, you know ‘Oh she’s not capable of killing,’ thing. I’m capable if I needed to. If I had a good enough reason. I think most people are. It’s having the capacity not to kill when you have the motivation that makes someone a good person isn’t it? So I guess that if you threatened me, or someone I cared about, Giorgio for example, then I could kill you. I could have killed Chic. I wanted to kill him on several occasions. But I didn’t and you’re just going to have to take my word for that.” They climbed in silence for a few minutes while he thought about what she’d said. He knew what he was capable of, was familiar with the sensation of cutting into warm, living human flesh with a sharp blade and he wondered if she was the same as him or if she was kidding herself about what she could actually do.

After a while she broke the silence. “Do you have siblings Jones?”

“I have a sister. JB. She’s a mixed media artist in Boulder. Her hair is purple and she makes me feel like a crusty old reactionary with my archaic heterosexuality and bourgeois notions of art and gender and, well, everything really.” He couldn’t talk about Jelly without his pride and affection for her revealing itself and, in the final analysis, he didn’t mind that. 

“I have a sister, Polly. She was the golden girl at home. I was always struggling to be more like Polly. But then she went and got herself knocked up in senior year of high school. Shock, horror, banishment to an unwed mother’s home. Yeah, who knew they still existed? Then Polly’s baby daddy got murdered. Not to beat around the bush, my sister went crazy. And my mom went some of the way with her. Her perfect daughter despoiled and broken. She started to focus on how to put the reserve daughter into the starting line up. And she got obsessed with keeping me…let’s say intact. It turned out that she had had a baby in high school just like Polly. She was scared it was some kind of curse on us all. She’d given her baby son up for adoption and was wracked with guilt about it. Polly's pregnancy was a punishment and she thought it'd keep happening because she had betrayed him.” Jughead was staring at her as he struggled to keep up over the stony terrain. It was a gothic horror story and the supposed main character wasn’t even in play yet. she glanced at him,“Yeah, I know that look. I tell this story and people think that either I’m lying so I must be crazy to make this up or it’s all true and if that happened to me it must have driven me crazy. Basically this story makes me look deranged. Which is why I haven’t told it.”

“Hey, I’ve heard crazier stories. I’ve been in some of them. Carry on.”

She did. She explained that she decided to track down her biological brother. She wasn’t sure if she wanted to deflect the searchlight glare of her mother’s attention away from her or to replace crazy Polly with a substitute or just to do a kind thing for a suffering mother. He suspected, listening to her, that it might have been all of those motivations, mingling together in the confused emotions of a high school girl whose world was falling apart. She told him how, through what a seventeen year old kid thought of as detective work, she had traced Charles Smith to a hostel where he was, if his account was to be believed, being violently intimidated by the landlord. He told her he'd been in the care system, that he had nowhere else to go, that he was scared. She rescued him, brought him into her home, like a baby bird she’d found on the sidewalk under its nest. Her mother welcomed him with open arms. He asked them to call him Chic.

Back then, she told him, she had thought that perhaps she’d like to be a writer one day. She began to write a story inspired by her brother. In the way of a precocious young writer, she piled on the drama and the trauma. He’d been in the care system and there were terrible stories in the press so she wrote about abuse, she was sexually inexperienced but curious, maybe even a little salacious so she made him a sex worker, she liked true crime documentaries so she subjected him to violent attacks. It was juvenalia of the most embarrassing type and it certainly would never have seen the light of day if not for a series of terrible events that destroyed the lives of everyone she cared about. She blamed herself because Chic had stolen her manuscript and said it was true, claimed it was his actual life. Suddenly she sat down on a rock at the side of the track while her eyes filled with tears that she wouldn’t permit to fall. He saw that her hands were shaking and, for the first time, he realised that the fiery assertiveness that he had enjoyed as they sparred with was just a defensive carapace. Underneath she was vulnerable and hurting badly. He felt responsible, like he had violated her in a way that he hadn’t grasped.

He sat on the rock next to her, uncomfortably aware that his shirt was wet with perspiration; in fact he felt strangely aware of his whole body. And of hers, soft and close. He didn’t know if he should put his arm around her or if she would think that was some sort of misguided, wildly insensitive advance. Instead he awkwardly put a hand on her shoulder, pushing his fingertips a little into the flesh, trying to reassure her that he understood. She turned to him, her eyes still swimming a little, “Nice comforting Jones. You’re really nailing that emotional intelligence aren’t you?”

“I’m sorry. I had you filed under badass bitch and now it turns out that you might actually be a human being. I’m having trouble adjusting. Look, I’m sorry I was such a pain in the ass. I guess I was focused on what I needed from you for the book and I kind of forgot to be a half decent human. I’m sorry about Gio too, but girl, that kid has got such a crush on you it hurts just to look at him. You torturing him every afternoon, talking to him about idioms when he just wants to kiss you. It’s not easy being a teenager in love with teacher; I could tell you stories about that. You’d be shocked.”

“Tell me. Were you in love with your teacher? Come on, talk. I need a break from my tale of woe.”

So he told her about Archie and the predatory music teacher. How she’d pursued him before he had any clear notion of his newly found sexual magnetism. How Jug had tried to extricate him without success, about how they’d almost thrown away a decade of friendship over it. Of course it had all come out and the woman had been driven out of town to go molest boys in new places when, even at sixteen years old, he’d been pretty sure she needed to be in jail. Jug was mad about it because there was an assumption that it was less criminal to abuse young men, that a teenage boy should be grateful to be violated. “It’s sexist in so many ways. It says that boys always have agency, that whatever happens to them, they made it happen. I know by experience that that ain’t true and it denies girls any agency whatsoever. They’re always passive objects, being moved about by men. It encourages this view of girls as incapable of self realisation, objects really. Sorry, I’m ranting. It just makes me mad.”

“Wow, I thought you were some kind of throwback, pioneer spirit, man’s man with your Marlboro cigarettes and your motorcycle but you’re talking like an ally. Reject those gender roles Jones! How come you were telling poor Georgie to tough out his pain yesterday?”

“I certainly hope I’m an ally. What kind of an asshat did you take me for? And it wasn’t because he’s male that I was telling Giorgio not to whine. If you’re hurting then you’re alive so be grateful. I’d say the same to anyone, to my sister. Not to you obviously because you seem to be doing a stand up job of toughing things out already. You’re crushing down your feelings like a champ Elizabeth.”

“Betty. Elizabeth was what my mother called me when I was failing to be an adequate stand in for Polly. You’re Jughead did you say?”

“Yep. It says Forsythe on my passport but I just can’t seem to fill out that name. It hangs very loose on me. Everyone just calls me Jug anyway.”

They moved off from their makeshift bench, the atmosphere between them more cordial, some of the antagonism left behind on the hillside. Soon they were heading down to a valley, peach orchards on one side, olive trees on the other. As if at a prearranged signal the cicadas began to chirrup and the air vibrated with their sound. The sun had risen higher as they had talked and the air was hot in his lungs. She resumed her story as they walked companionably along the wider sunbaked path. She told him that Chic had behaved oddly once he moved into Polly’s old room. She’d find him in her bedroom, and she suspected he’d been going through her things. Her journals seemed disarranged, her pictures moved. He had guests in the house when she was at school and her mom was at work. She’d come home unexpectedly and meet a different strange man on the stairs every time. Then one night she woke to find Chic sitting on her bed, staring at her in a way she was sure a brother shouldn’t. She began to wonder what she had brought into her home. Jug understood her feeling of constant jeopardy. His teenage years had been filled with insecurity too. The difference was that she knew, with certainty, that she had placed herself and her mom in this danger. She’d sought it out.

As they approached Casperia they were headed uphill again, the village on one of the peaks for which the region was named. She paused her story to climb. He felt like a creep because when she led the way he couldn't help staring at her ass, the jeans shorts impossible to look away from almost at eye level. He stepped ahead of her but then when he looked back he found his gaze drawn down her shirt where he could see the lace of her bra. Soon, to his relief, they passed through an archway in the ancient town walls and he found himself on a narrow cobbled street. “Very Game of Thrones,” he observed in a weak attempt to lighten the mood and she actually smiled at him. The smile was a revelation, it felt like cooling water on his burning skin, refreshing and energising. Whether he liked it or not, suddenly his mission became to extract as many of those smiles from her as possible and gather them tightly to his chest. 

“Let’s hope not too much like. I can live without a red wedding. Although you’re never getting married.” He was confused. 

“I hit your feet with the broom the other day. The local superstition is that if you let a broom touch your foot you’ll never marry.”

“Well I’m more worried about the bruise you left on my ankle. It was a vicious weapon.”

“No pining girlfriend waiting at home for you to make an honest woman of her then?”

“No, no girlfriend, no home to be honest.’ Somewhere in the back recesses of his mind he wondered if her question was more than a polite enquiry. “I’ve been travelling so much that it seemed pointless to keep paying rent just to keep my books somewhere. So the books went into a storage unit and I live out of a backpack.”

“Sounds unsettled.”

“That’s never really bothered me before but now I have this idea for a book I’ll need somewhere to write. Maybe I’ll be like you and move out to some remote place and hunker down to get it done.” Just for a second he imagined himself at that scrubbed table, behind the blue door, typing. It was a stupid fantasy. He needed to change track, right the hell now. “Hey can we get something to eat? I skipped breakfast.”

They found a bar and sat at an outdoor table to drink fresh orange juice and coffee and for Jug to work his way through a range of pastries. She lingered over a cappuccino, pulling pieces off a croissant with her strong fingers. He liked watching her do that. He liked it when she placed a morsel into her beautiful mouth, when her tongue emerged to lick the coffee foam from her lips. When she put her fingers into her mouth one by one to clean them of crumbs he felt like he imagined Giorgio did in his English lessons. He’d never had any problem with professional distance before, thinking of himself almost like the priest in the confessional, the detached listener. Now he was turned on, hot and sticky with exertion and desire. He needed a cold shower. 

She was asking him about the death train. She’d obviously read the articles that he’d left with her. He focused on telling her about a forty year old woman that he had met, how she had lost her leg when she slipped between two cars of the train, how she faced deportation from Mexico back to Honduras where her life was in constant danger. She’d wept when she told him that she couldn’t afford for her sons to go to school. She'd hoped to get to the US so that her boys could study, could be doctors or engineers but now she was just another burden on them. “But she wasn’t in the article. Why didn’t you write about her?”

“I’m not going to say I did anything illegal or rat out people who know how to do that stuff but Inès and her boys may or may not be living in Philly now.” He grinned widely. “I know it’s the tip of this massive iceberg of pain and misery and injustice but if we all just did whatever it took to help one Inès it’d chip a little off that iceberg wouldn’t it? I had Thanksgiving with them last year.” He couldn’t conceal his glee as he popped another pastry in his mouth. He was suspicious of his own motivation in telling her that story. To his absolute shock she leaned forward and brushed her lips against his cheek.

“Thank you. Thank you for Inès and her sons but also thank you for telling me that. I keep forgetting that most people are good most of the time. You’re not so bad Jones.” He was aware that he was blushing and nervous, less like a hardened reporter and rather more like a sixteen year old kid with a crush.

“Well thank you Betty for that vote of confidence. What now?”

“Well it’s three more hours to Vacone and then it would be at least four back and you seemed to be flagging a little as we climbed up here. And to be honest I’m flagging a little with the story. It’s hard going back over everything I’ve been trying to forget for four years.”

“We could leave it for today and start again tomorrow. That’s if you can give me some more time. What do you say? Maybe less walking tomorrow?” She laughed and nodded her head and they left the cafe to wander around the village a little before heading back to Cantalupo. The winding, cobbled streets offered welcome shade, the steps and doorways creating slices of burnt sienna and umber shadow amid the yellow ochre of the stone walls. Behind and above it the sky was entirely cloudless like a flat blue backdrop to a stage set. It would be one of those comedies by Shakespeare where gentlemen in doublet and hose mistake each other’s identities and turn out to be girls dressed up as men acted by men dressed up as girls. Admittedly he hadn’t paid too much attention to Shakespeare in college, preferring the jump scares and arabesques of the gothic. It was quiet, no cars capable of navigating the twisting alleyways. She produced sunscreen from a pocket in her bag and insisted that he slathered it on despite his claims that his olive skin rarely burned. He wanted her to offer to put it on for him but she didn’t and he slapped it onto the back of his neck petulantly. She remarked that he spoke some Italian and he told her that he had written a story a few years before about shadowy Sicilans funding mayoral candidates in US cities. Mostly it seemed to be more nepotism than the sinister fingers of the mafia but he’d picked up some of the language while trying to infiltrate one of the campaigns. “Olive skin, dark hair. I can pass as Italian heritage.”

“The eyes give you away. Too blue. Way, way too blue.” He shivered despite the heat as her green eyes looked into his for just a heartbeat longer that they needed to in order to confirm their colour. He shook his head a little so his hair fell forward into them, a reflex that persisted from the shy kid he’d been before gangs and war zones had beaten it out of him.

They passed back through the village walls for the return journey. Walking back in the heat was even more arduous but as they chatted about her life in Italy he seemed to stop noticing the rocky path or the burning sun. “Your Italian is fluent. Did you learn here?” 

She laughed. “Yes and no. I actually took some Italian in college. Literature. I had this obsession with a poem by Giovanni Pascoli called The Lightning. Do you know it?”

“No, journalism major.” He pointed to his chest. “My lit courses were all Lovecraft and Poe I’m afraid. Do you know it by heart?”

“I do, but in Italian. Hey we can see how good your cosa nostra Italian is. Translate. ‘E cielo e terra si mostrò qual era.’”

“Oh god, I’m pretty sure I’m not up to literature…and sky and earth showed themselves as they are…as what they’re like. Something like that.”

“Molto bene. Right, next line. ‘La terra ansante, livida, in sussulto.’”

“The earth…something…livid, in a gasp.”

“Yes, the word you don’t know is panting.The earth panting, livid, gasping.” His eyes caught hers and they both looked away quickly, embarrassed. “Il cielo ingombro, tragico, disfatto,” she continued quickly.

He blew out a long breath with the effort of dredging up these unfamiliar words. “The sky something, tragic. Disfatto? Not done. I’m not making this sound poetic am I?”

“No but you’re doing well. The sky, burdened, tragic, undone. ‘Bianca bianca nel tacito tumulto,’”

“White white in the silent tumult. You might even go silent storm for the consonance.”

“Ah now he’s a poet. Una casa apparì sparì d’un tratto.”

“A house appeared disappeared in a moment…”

“Yes exactly. Last two lines. ‘Come un occhio, che, largo, esterrefatto, s’aprì si chiuse, nella notte nera’”

“Like an eye that, long, shocked, opened and closed, in the black night.”

“Good, yes, we’d say an eye was wide in English though. So like an eye that wide, shocked, opened and closed in the black night. It’s not a terrible translation.”

“OK, well it’s atmospheric but why did that hit you so hard?”

“That’s the part of the story that I’m going to tell you tomorrow. Anyway I knew some Italian so when I needed to get away, get off grid, I thought that, since I spoke the language, I’d come to Italy. And I knew about Horace, you know, the classical poet, getting his farm in Sabina as a reward for his writing so I thought that Sabina was as good a place as any. I’d come here as my reward for my terrible, destructive writing. Anyone who looked for me in Italy would think I’d go to Rome or Florence, somewhere obvious like that. Then when I arrived I discovered my college Italian was almost useless, no-one spoke it in the way that the poets I’d studied used it. You’ve got useful Italian, I bet you can order dinner or probably arrange a hit, where I had useful Italian for translating a poem. Anyway I was already here, it would be hard for me to leave, so I buckled down and learned. And now I find myself thinking in Italian sometimes. I love it. The sound of it. “Nella notte nera.” What could be more lovely?” 

“So no one back home knows where you are?”

“Well, that would be telling, wouldn’t it? I'm not giving up all my secrets.”

He wanted to know how she lived, how she made her living. English lessons for lovestruck teens couldn’t keep the wolf from the door. She talked about the ad revenue on her blog, some product placement but he knew that wasn’t enough. He pushed a little and eventually she gave him an answer that wasn’t an answer. “I have work that I can’t talk about. I sign non disclosure agreements. I keep a secret or two and my clients keep my secret. Nothing illegal. But secret. And actually pretty well paid.”

They were back at the blue door before he wanted to be. He looked at her much as a stray dog looks at someone it has followed home, hopeful but with an expectation of being kicked. She did neither. “Bye then. Same time tomorrow? Do you want me to fill your water bottle before you go? Or are you going to use the stream again?”

He felt aggrieved without good reason but he couldn’t deny that he was prone to dramatic sulks so he said “Stream,” and stomped off towards it. On impulse he lay on the bank and submerged his whole head in the icy water, flinging his hair back and snapping up into a squat when the cold made his head ache reminding him of taking huge mouthfuls of ice cream as a kid, fearful that someone would dash away the cone if he wasn’t quick enough. He rubbed his hand over his face and looked back towards the front door to find she was watching. He pulled his fingers through his hair, a little bashful. Their eyes met for a moment and she went inside, the door closing a little more firmly than necessary.

In Baltimore almost six months later he walked through the cemetery gates with Chic’s grieving mother and into a coffee shop that he had taken note of when he arrived two hours earlier and she told him her version of the story. She and her husband had met when he was already in his fifties. She was much younger and had wanted a baby but it hadn’t happened so they had decided to adopt. Charles had come to them when he was thirteen months old. She had no experience with children and some of his behaviours had seemed, if not quite normal, then at least an understandable product of a disrupted infancy. He would grow out of it they thought. But he didn’t. He was mean to his playmates, so cruel to his puppy that they had to rehome it for fear of what he would do. Then there was the lying, outrageous, shocking falsehoods. Almost everything he said was untrue. His father tried to discipline him but nothing seemed to work, not taking away his toys, not confining him to his room, not taking away his TV, nothing. He was a bully at school, violent at home. When he left, without a word, when he was nineteen, she admitted tearfully, part of her was happy. She worried about him because she knew he used drugs but her husband was old and the fighting and shouting was too much for him. And then the terrible book had been published. It was a different name but he appeared briefly on TV, in a magazine. Someone recognised him. Her neighbours judged her, she couldn’t go to her clubs anymore, the charity that she helped didn’t return her calls. People had thought that there must be a fire if there was so much smoke. Perhaps the boy hadn’t been abused in exactly the ways he claimed but he must have been traumatised somehow. His father had a stroke. He was confined to his bed for six months and then he died. “I tried to contact Charles but his publisher said that he didn’t acknowledge us as his parents and he refused to come to the funeral.” Tears appeared in her eyes for the first time as she remembered this insult to her husband. Then, she told him, six weeks later she had a call from the police department in Chicago to say that Charles was dead from an overdose. She had found herself arranging another funeral even though he had said he wanted nothing to do with them. “I had thought that his friend would want to make the arrangements but he never even contacted me.”

“His friend?”

“Yes, he was with Charles when it happened. He identified his body in the morgue. Charles left his whole estate to him but he didn’t even attend the service. I thought it was so unfeeling.”

“Do you recall the friend’s name?”

“Of course.”


	3. Our Fate Cannot Be Taken From Us; It Is A Gift.

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> A talk, a soft drink, desire.

Charles’ mother had given him the name of the heir and a suspicion began to form in his mind that he wasn’t ready to articulate yet. She was sad that someone close to her son didn't feel able to grieve with her for his loss but she was grateful that he had taken on the onerous task of identifying Charles' body so that she didn't have to look into the dead face of her boy as she had looked at her husband only a few weeks before. Since the estate of Charles Cooper was now in the hands of one Richard Greenleaf Jug thought that there must be a way to follow the money directly to him. He called Veronica. “Hi V. I need a favour. Do you know any movie producers?” Veronica was reluctant to call in favours with no immediate benefit to her booze and nightclub business so Jug had to play a big card to bring her on board. “If I can just fit this piece of the jigsaw I might be able to get her back V. Please?”

Veronica was a hard-nosed entrepreneur but she was also the slushiest of romantics, “Oh my god, Italy girl? I thought you’d given up. You said that she’d made her feelings clear and you were out.”

“Well I’m obviously not out. She’s it Veronica. I can’t seem to move on. If she has all the options and she says that she’s just not into me then fine but I can’t let it go like this. Not if there's anything I can do.”

Veronica obliged. She had the number of an indie producer who’d worked with Linklater and a couple of cases of Lodge "Reserva Exclusiva" rum persuaded her to call publishers and agents to make enquiries about the film rights to Charles’ misery porn opus. Veronica called him back that evening with a phone number. “I hope she’s worth it Jug. We love you. We don’t want to see you get hurt.”

“Me either. Thanks V. Say ciao to Archie for me.”

After that day of hiking in the Sabine Hills Jug had slept badly, his dreams still haunted by a girl with green eyes. In his mind she was sitting at a cafe table, smiling at him over a newspaper, the sun in her hair. She leaned forward to kiss him and he startled awake, wracked with longing to dream again. He found that his detachment had evaporated. He was supposed to be considering the possibility that she had murdered her brother but he simply found that impossible to contemplate. The next morning he was so anxious to get back to that blue door that he drank a glass of water and set out at once, foregoing breakfast, even the coffee. He was early, arriving before seven and sitting on the dry grass, his back against a crumbling low wall, to wait. He meant to only close his eyes for a moment but the morning was cool and still, the air silent now, the cicadas not yet chirruping and he hadn’t given his system its customary caffeine kickstart. The next thing he was aware of was the smell of coffee. He opened his eyes to find her sitting beside him, holding a demitasse under his nose. He took the cup, still half dozing. “If this is a dream I don’t want to wake up.”

“Look at you, fast asleep out here like Endymion. Shall we get this story over with?” Her hair was loose today, falling in soft waves over her shoulders. It made her look younger, more vulnerable. She leaned back against the wall next to him and he remembered that she had said it was easier to talk if she wasn’t looking at him so he tore his eyes away and faced forward as he prompted her.

“Of course. You were telling me about how Chic was creeping you out.”

“He was a very creepy dude. So this is where the horror starts for real. One night I get home and find my mom, on her knees in a pool of blood. So much blood. There’s a dead guy on the living room floor, she’s trying to mop up all this blood and Chic is on the couch, apparently catatonic. I still don’t exactly know what happened. Mom kept saying there was an accident but when I went to call the cops she got hysterical. She was screaming that Chic had a criminal record, if he was implicated in the death of this guy then he could go to jail for a long time, she couldn't lose another child. We had to cover it up. I was sixteen, my mom is covered in blood, there’s a corpse, gore everywhere. It clots you know. If there’s enough of it. Like lumps of iron smelling jello. I just turned into a robot. "The earth panting, livid, gasping," fear and disgust. We cleaned up. We got the body into her station wagon, tugging at it, at him I should say, but in my head I turned it into a thing, a burden, ingombro, an encumbrance. Chic was still on the couch but just as I’m closing the front door he winks at me. Un occhio. S’aprì si chiuse. An eye, opens and closes. And that’s when I realise that he killed this guy and now he has this over us, he can say that we did it and we can’t prove that he’s lying. Because why didn’t we call the authorities? So it’s like we’re in check and I don’t know what to do because the next move is checkmate and then we’re done.”

“Fuck Betty. So you’re living in the house with this guy that you think committed a murder and you’re expecting that either you’ll be next or he’ll frame you? High school was not fun for you was it?” He wanted to have been there for her, wanted to have been able to punch this guy square in the face. Too late now.

“Nope, I honestly thought he might burn down the house. I was constantly on high alert. I still don’t sleep. Like I’ll start to drift off and then suddenly, in a flash, I’ll see that bloody room in our home, like a lightning strike. The house appears and disappears. The poem has it exactly. Shock, my heart racing, almost screaming. Then I’ll just get up and sit out here in the darkness, waiting to be so exhausted that my brain just shuts down. Takes a couple of days sometimes.”

“Christ Betty, that’s awful. I’m so sorry.” 

They sat and looked out at the hillside, green with olive groves and orchards even in the summer heat. He could see how this landscape, the rolling hills, the medieval villages, the cypresses like punctuation marks, the clear skies might offer a kind of balm to her troubled psyche. It was healing. Eventually she went on. “Well I got to a point where I had to do something, anything. So I began my amateur detective work again, tracing Chic’s childhood. I was wondering if he had been violent at the children’s home where he grew up. And I found out several things that I naïvely thought would save us. First it turned out that he had only been in the institution for a year before he was adopted. He was actually brought up in a very nice, upper middle class home by a perfectly lovely suburban family. I met his adoptive mom, pretending I was trying to trace my family tree. She seemed to want to talk about him with someone. She showed me their photograph album. Chic on his bike, Chic at the beach, Chic with his puppy. They had sent him to a good school but he had some discipline issues, there was a nasty incident with a kid he’d bullied who’d tried to kill himself, allegations about dealing drugs. He hadn’t graduated. They tried to get him a job but eventually he had moved out and hadn’t given them an address. I think that they loved him despite it all but they hadn’t hired anyone to find him. Perhaps they were relieved. But he hadn’t been raised in an institution or disadvantaged like he’d said when I found him. That was a lie, one that played on my prejudices and expectations. So I decided to check the adoption records which are, of course, confidential. I can’t tell you how I got to see them because it might not have been completely legal. I can tell you that one summer at camp I taught myself how to pick a lock with a straightened bobby pin to get to the office phone so I could call Polly whenever I wanted.” She reached into her pocket and pulled out a few hairpins and showed them to him before winding her hair around her hand and skilfully securing it in a pile on top of her head in a messy bun. It made his breath catch, the familiar ease of the movement, the smooth line of her raised arm over her head, the way it pulled her breast up. He had to drag his focus back so he looked away, over the landscape again. “I have copies of the documents if you don’t believe it. Turned out that two little boys called Charles had been admitted to the home in the same month. The one that I’d tracked down wasn’t the boy my mom had turned over to them. Chic wasn’t even my brother.”

Jug forgot about not looking at her; he stared in disbelief. “And you have evidence of this? You can prove this? Why did you keep it quiet?”

“Well lots of reasons but mainly because when I confronted him with all of my sleuthing he laughed and said he’d had a good run, it’d lasted longer than he’d expected and that he’d move out but if I ever tried to expose him he’d tell the police that he’d seen mom and I murder a guy and hide the evidence. So we took what we thought was a draw, stalemate not checkmate. He moved out. I finished high school, went to college in New York, thought I could have a life where I never saw or heard from him again. And for almost four years it held true.”

“And then the book came out.”

“Right. I actually bought it. Paid money for my own stupid fantasy. He’d altered some details but broadly it was just my book. He must have got hold of it when he was snooping in my room. I had no password on my laptop; why would I? I was a high school kid. He’d added the chapter where my mom murders a guy and I help her cover it up. It wasn't well written. And he’d altered a minor character who persuades him to begin sex work to make it me. When the police came with a warrant for my mom I realised that I didn’t have to keep my side of the bargain anymore so I tried to go to the press with my story. The problem I had was that I couldn’t tell them he wasn’t even my brother without revealing how I’d got that information, and it wasn’t legal. That was going to make me look like a criminal and discredit all my claims to be innocent. And I was stupidly naïve about the world so I didn’t realise how this was all going to play in the media. It looked like I was part of this terrible abusive family who had done awful things to a traumatised and vulnerable kid and now I was saying that this brave survivor was lying. It looked bad, I can see why it looked bad. The newspapers wouldn’t go near my version so I used social media to get my story out. They tore me to pieces on twitter, in the press, on those terrible gossip websites, in the tabloids. And I was a young woman. There aren’t any consequences for attacking us, for threatening women online with murder, rape anything. How could I have imagined that my word would be believed over that of the white man who was also playing the victim card? I was outplayed before I began.”

“But some people believed you. There were stories about him too.”

“I had a professor who went to bat for me. She’s kind of a public intellectual so she has some influence. She was pointing out that no-one was investigating Chic’s version and that if it were true he should be able to back up his claims. He was on this huge book tour and he seemed to be spiralling, believing his own press. The stories were apparently getting wilder and wilder, rituals, cults, suicide pacts…And if anyone pushed him he just got more emphatic and doubled down on the lies until the stories began to sound weird even to his supporters. So people were beginning to think maybe he wasn’t actually as reliable as they’d imagined. Then the online trolls were playing both sides against the middle, he was a lying junkie rent boy with a vivid imagination and I was the sibling from hell. People started heckling him at book readings to prove his stories and he couldn’t handle the image being challenged. I tried to get in touch with his parents but they’d moved and I couldn’t trace them. My mom was still being questioned by the cops. She told them that Chic had killed the man in our home and that she had done what any mother would. It was her word against his and she was trying to keep me out of the whole mess but I called her in jail and she told me that she was going to take them to the place where we’d hidden the body. It’d be obvious that she couldn’t have dumped it alone and then they’d arrest me too. But late one night a few days later, I was online and it was there in my news feed. Celebrated abuse survivor found dead of a suspected overdose. I know it’s wrong but for a minute I thought it was all going to be OK. He couldn’t hurt us anymore. But then when I went on twitter people were saying I’d murdered him, that I’d spiked his fix, that I’d hexed him for god’s sake! There were pictures…well I don’t want to think about that.”

Jug had seen some of the pictures she was talking about. Photoshopped images of her killing Chic, images of her in the electric chair or being burned at the stake. Horrific things from twisted imaginations. He put a hand on her arm and it seemed to bring her back to herself and she looked at him, carefully and scrutinisingly.

“You know you’re not as tough as you pretend to be are you Jones? You’re all hardboiled and cynical but when it gets real you care a little too much. Inès would have been a great story but you’d rather actually help. But I’m sorry, you can’t help me. Chic’s dead. There’s no way to get him to ‘fess up now.” The cicadas had started up, his coffee cup was long emptied and the sun was beginning to bake them along with the wall they rested against. She seemed to make a sudden decision. “Look, come in. There’s a cortile, umm...a courtyard I guess. I’ll get you a drink.”

He jumped to his feet, excited to finally see beyond the blue door. She led him into a cool room, pale terracotta tiles on the floor, the rustic wood of the table silvered by scrubbing and age, the stove that he recognised, a single armchair nearby. She had a pile of books on the floor by the chair. There was a large print of an abstract expressionist painting opposite the window, slashes of yellow and black on a neutral ground. A copy of the New Yorker lay on the table. If it hadn’t been for those details the interior could have been from any time period in the last two hundred years. It felt comfortable and simple, a place of peace. “Come through,” she said opening another door to the courtyard. The pale ochre stone of the house met another that looked even older, rough hewn block work with fragments of carved stones studded through it. There was a vine that climbed across the wall from its gnarled trunk and was then trained overhead along some wires, leaves dappling the area in green shade. It was still early in the grape season, tiny fruit beginning to appear and some flowers lingering, imparting a subtle odour of lemon and vanilla. There was just one chair with a woven straw seat so she dragged another from its place beside the kitchen table and placed it on the flagstones. She disappeared into the kitchen again and reemerged with two soda bottles. “Have you tried cedrata? I’ve got a coke if you don’t like it.”

“I’ll try anything,” he replied gamely. She passed him a plain glass bottle, the outside slippery, dripping with condensation. It was icy cold and made his jaw ache as he took a mouthful. The coldness was almost painful but it was exactly what he needed and he brought the bottle back to his lips immediately. It had a refreshing citrus flavour with a gingery heat. It was like her, cool and strong but with a burn that lingered. He felt a little awkward, out of place, like an intruder but conscious of the honour of being invited into her private space. He guessed that not many people made it past that blue door. “Are you lonely?”

“I wasn’t.” She looked at him with her cool green gaze. “I was feeling OK until you showed up, dredging this stuff back up, muddying the waters again. I thought everything was fine. But I’ve been thinking about my mom, about Polly, about the friends I left behind in college. I didn’t get to finish my degree and I’m mad about that now.”

“I guess I should say that I’m sorry but I’m not. Not really. You should be mad. You had something bad happen to you. Why should you just absorb that injustice? You can’t get even because he up and died but you can retrieve what you regret losing, can’t you?”

“I wouldn’t know where to begin. I went to the police before they came to me. I told them everything and even showed them the documents that proved that Chic wasn’t my brother. I was lucky they didn’t arrest me for having those since I wouldn’t explain how I’d come by them, but Chic was dead and I suppose it seemed futile. And young, blonde college girls don’t often get arrested. His autopsy proved that he’d been an addict for years, long before he came to live with us. There was evidence that he’d been trying to get clean on the tour but that’s always a dangerous time. His tolerance was lowered and he made a miscalculation. Street drugs in a strange city, it felt kind of inevitable. Mom had taken them to the place we'd hidden the body like she said. The dead guy was a debt collector for a dealer, hired muscle, a known associate of Chic’s. It seemed more plausible that the guy with a habit and a record would have killed him than a suburban mom and a college junior. They let us go. 

When we got home the press were outside on the lawn day and night. There were people with placards, calling us abusers and murderers. Then one day I woke up and mom had gone, she’d found some hippy commune that would take her and Polly. She left me to face things alone; it had always been Polly, you see. I couldn’t live under scrutiny like that. There were skits about me on comedy shows, I was the face of family disfunction, the ultimate evil little sister. I was Lizzie Borden with a syringe. I just had to get away, so I ran. But the problem with hiding is that as soon as you emerge it all starts up again. Which is why I wasn’t delighted when you rocked up, all swagger and intrusive questions.”

“No, I totally see that. Would you go back, if you could, I mean?”

“Not permanently, no. But I’d like to be able to go without being scared of being noticed and pilloried. I’d like to be able to finish the degree I guess. But it doesn’t feel like home now. Italy is home.”

“Show me the documents then. I can trace his parents. Write the true history of Chic and get it out there. It’ll still be a circus the first time you go back but if we can set the record straight you won’t be in exile forever.”

“For your book?”

He shrugged. “I don’t know. It wouldn’t be the book I was planning. It’s a family drama and a crime story and a psychological thriller.”

“And if it’s a success other writers and journalists and true crime podcasters will be following in your footsteps up that hill to get a look at me. So much for hiding out.”

He looked at her. He couldn’t deny that the better the book did for him the worse it would be for her. “I don’t have to write it Betty. This is your life. You say the word and I’ll walk away from it.”

“ No, if it has to be written I guess I’d rather you do it. Do you have what you need?” He was sad to think that she was about to dismiss him, send him off down the hill with no excuse to come back and knock at the blue door. 

“Well, I guess so. I might need to fact check a few things maybe. As I write. But pretty much done.” She reached forward and took his hand in hers, fingers still cool from where she had been holding the soda bottle.

"Vuoi fare l'amore con me? Would you like to go to bed with me before you leave?”

She couldn’t have said anything that would have surprised him more. Jughead was generally impossible to shock but his mouth hung open as his mind whirled. He felt like he was riding the bike too fast on a windy road, struggling to hold the line. Exhilarated. Had he misheard? He must have misheard. In two languages. There was no way...

“It’s fine if not,” she was saying. “It’s just that I find you attractive and you seemed to like me and you’re leaving so it can’t get complicated. But, no, bad idea I suppose.”

“No!” he interrupted, too loud, too eager to try to be cool. “ I mean no, it’s a great idea. Stellar idea. I just didn’t expect...” What? How had he envisioned the end of that sentence? He didn’t expect the woman who had been wandering naked through his dreams for days to simply offer herself to him like fulfilling his fantasies was no big deal, like she’d just asked him to change a lightbulb or pick up some bread from the store. His heart was pounding and his mouth was dry. “What...I mean...would...”

She smiled at his gibbering confusion. “I was suggesting that we have sex and then you go home and write your book. I’m not in a place where I can have a relationship and Cantalupo is not the place to look for casual hookups unless you want to be the scandal of the whole village. So...” He answered by leaning forward and placing his lips against hers, firmly, decisively but not forcing the pace. She sighed against his mouth and leaned forward until he could feel her breasts against his chest. She dragged his lower lip between her teeth and he thought that he might explode with desire. “Bed?” she whispered and he moaned out his assent to the suggestion. She took his hand and led him back into the house and up the narrow staircase. As she climbed he looked at her ass as he had done when they walked the day before but now he felt emboldened to reach out to stroke his hand from her lower back down to the thigh, the muscles moving as she walked and making him more aroused than he could ever remember being before. She smiled at him over her shoulder and, reaching the top of the stairs leaned back against the wall so that he could press against her and kiss her, moving his tongue against her lips, then into her mouth, stroking against her tongue and then moving his lips to brush over her neck. He took the bottom of her shirt in his fingers and looked into her eyes for permission. She smiled and nodded and he pulled it off over her head, tearing his own tank off as quickly as he could so he could return to kissing her, open mouthed against her breast, her collar bone, her neck. Now her hand was on his belt buckle and he could hear himself whining but was powerless to stop it, imagining her hands on him as he had done several times as he tried to sleep over the nights since he met her. He lifted her breasts from the cups of her bra, heavier than he had imagined, unbelievably soft and smooth. He dipped his head to take her nipple between his lips, sucking, nipping gently, eliciting a groan from her that made him twitch with lust. Now his hands were over her breasts, squeezing them with his fingers, holding them so that he could kiss more thoroughly, at the edge of his control. She unzipped his jeans, reaching into his boxers to stroke him and smiling with genuine pleasure. They were still at the top of the stairs but now she pushed open the door to the left to reveal her bedroom. The wooden shutters were closed but the window was open so the breeze blew the yellow drapes into the room as the door opened. He pushed her gently back against the white bed linen and knelt on the edge of the bed to unbutton her shorts and drag them down her legs. She sat up and unhooked her bra and threw it across the room and then pulled at the waistband of his underwear, pouting until he pulled off his boots and stepped out of jeans and boxers at the same time. “Oh Jones, you are a very pretty thing. Don’t think I didn’t notice all that business with the wet T shirt and the hair by the stream. Peacocking.”

“I don’t know what you mean. I was hot."

"You certainly are."

"You’re so beautiful Betty. I can’t believe I’m here with you. I’ve been dreaming about you.”

“Have you been touching yourself Jughead? Have you been thinking about me when you took your shower? Because I’ve been thinking about you. Here in my bed, at night. Wishing that you were here, touching me, instead of my own hand.”

Jug had lost the power of rational thought he was so turned on by this woman. “Christ, I want you so much. Tell me what you like. What do you want? I want to make it so good for you.”

She took his wrist and brought his hand to the front of her underwear. “Touch me, make me come Jug. I’ve been so lonely.” He pulled her panties down her legs and threw them across the room and then he lay beside her, his hand between her legs, using his finger to stroke her gently, then he found where her pleasure was the greatest and he pressed against her, then rubbing softly in slow rhythmic circles until she began to pant, her chest heaving. He took her breast into his mouth again, sucking harder now, intending the marks that he saw appearing as she whined in the back of her throat. He kept his thumb moving against the nerves that were making her thrust up against his hand and then pushing one of his long fingers inside her, then two fingers and she was breathing in between her teeth, moaning “Yes, yes, oh yes.”

“Can I use my mouth?” he murmured, seeing how close she was.

“Please, please.” she cried out between gasps and he moved quickly to put his mouth on her, sucking gently, licking at her, breathing so hard with his own desire that he thought he might pass out. And then she was trembling, vibrating with her climax, moaning and rolling her head back, arching her back, giving herself over to it completely. He thought he would remember her orgasm for as long as he lived. As she came down she smiled at him contentedly, “Mmm, thank you. That was just lovely.” 

He grinned at her, “Customer satisfaction guaranteed.”

“What would you like, beautiful man? Return the favour?” She licked her lips in the most lascivious way possible and he was more than tempted by her beautiful mouth but it wasn’t what he wanted right now.

“I just want to be inside you Betty.”

“Condom?” she asked and he could have kicked himself. 

“Fuck it. No. In my leather jacket, back in my hotel room. Fuck.” She looked almost as disappointed but then she giggled. 

“Oh wait. I bought some for Giorgio!” He stared at her dumbstruck. What the hell? “Oh no, not like that…he’s a good Catholic boy going go university in the city. His dad isn’t going to tell him to rubber up. I’m worried he’ll get some innocent little Catholic girl knocked up or get the clap or something so I bought him condoms. But after you said what you said the other day I can’t give them to him without sending out very confusing messages can I? Anyway I have condoms. Crisis averted!” She scrambled, naked, off the bed and disappeared into the bathroom, reappearing with the largest box of condoms he had ever seen.

“Fuck Betty, were you trying to supply the kid for life? That box sets a pretty damn intimidating target.”

“So you don’t think we’ll need more then?” she grinned at him as she sat next to him on the bed and dragged her hand over him from calf to shoulder, following the movement by placing soft kisses where her hand had been. He threw his head back against the pillow and let her kiss his body everywhere. It was the most accepting, affectionate and yet sexy experience of his life, he was transported by it. Then he was aware of her ripping open a wrapper and sliding the condom over him. He opened his eyes as she swung a leg across his body. “Is this what you want?” He nodded wordlessly, and she sank onto him in a slow, excruciating, delicious movement. He watched her, fascinated as she moved on him, her eyes closed, a tiny crease between her eyebrows as she found her rhythm. He found her hypnotic. He reached up to stroke her breasts but he needed more access so he sat up and she instantly began to whine, her movements becoming less coordinated. He held her hips to steady her and began to kiss and suck her breasts and a low moan formed in her chest. He reached a hand between them to give her more friction and he felt her begin to clench against him. Suddenly she pulled off him, laying on her back, pulling him over her. “I’m close, come with me.” He didn’t need to be told again, he plunged into her, thrusting and rolling against her, stroking her with his hand at the same time, murmuring reassurances and endearments against her neck. She came in a spasm, gasping. He could finally let go, abandon the control that he had been clinging to with mounting desperation. He came inside her, feeling such release, such a sense of completeness that he almost wept. He definitely wanted to marry Elizabeth Cooper. He thought it was probably not the best moment for a proposal but he filed the information away for a later date.


	4. There Is No Greater Sorrow Than To Recall Happiness In A Time Of Misery

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> A loss, a search, a meeting.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> "Nessun maggior dolore che ricordarsi del tempo felice ne la miseria."

Thanks to Veronica and her amazing networking skills he had a cellphone number for Greenleaf. He knew a slightly shady guy who would rush a reverse lookup to get an address from that information so within a day he knew where to find him. Even better it was a Manhattan address so a mere hop, skip and jump from the sublet in the Bronx where Jug had been keeping his backpack since he came back, disconsolate, from Italy in the summer. Impulsively he got on the bike and wove through New York traffic until he found the address. It was pretty fancy but the book sales had been boosted massively by the death of the author so it was easily affordable for Chic's heir. He took a deep breath and rang the bell, preparing himself to wing the encounter. As soon as the door opened Jug knew that his unvoiced suspicions had been correct. “Chic, my man. Betty sends her love.” With that Jug pulled back his fist and slammed it hard into the shocked face of the late Charles Cooper aka Charles McCleod aka Richard Greenleaf.

After Betty Cooper had blown his mind in the bedroom of the house with the blue door and they had lain together on her bed, whispering to each other about irrelevancies and nonsense, things had become a little tense. There was a knock downstairs and Giorgio’s voice called “Ciao? Signorina Betty? Are you home?”

“Shit, I forgot about Georgie’s lesson,” she hissed, clearly embarrassed to be caught with a very naked, very satisfied man in her bedroom. “Let’s not make this a whole thing in front of him, right?”

“OK, but I can come and see you tomorrow?” he murmured, kissing her hair.

“Sure, sure,” she whispered distractedly, pulling on her underwear and looking for her shirt. “Just a minute Georgie. Hold on.” 

Jug got dressed, kissed her again and whispered “Ciao Bella” before trotting downstairs, not entirely caring that the kid would probably be able to hear his boots on the treads from outside. He pulled open the door to see Gio’s shocked and suspicious face. “Hey kid. See ya,” he said before heading off down the hill whistling, unmistakably a man who had just been laid.

Back at the hotel he showered, he began to write but mostly he daydreamed about her, about a life with her. Gio was a terse and inattentive waiter at dinner but he couldn’t blame the kid. He drank a beer on his balcony and read Hemingway until bedtime and then he slept like a log. 

The next morning he drank coffee, ate pastries with an enormous appetite and set off up the hill at a trot, eager to see her. The door was closed so he knocked, the window was shuttered so he called out, finally he climbed the wall at the back to find the courtyard door bolted. He peered through the kitchen window. Her print was gone from the wall, no copy of the New Yorker, nothing. He didn’t know what to do with the panic rising from his gut, making him feel like he was about to bring back his breakfast. As he stood dumbstruck in the heat on the dusty path his phone pinged and he grabbed it. There was a message from her.

“Hi Jughead. I’m not sure if you were serious when you said you were going to stop by today. I just thought I should let you know that I’ve moved on. As I said, it was a one time thing. Now you go home and write your book. I can’t face the hacks and the trolls again so it's better you don’t know where I am. Write your book, I give you my blessing. I had the loveliest time with you. You are a very special man, maybe the most special. Thank you. Goodbye.  
X  
(La donna Americana)”

He immediately tried to call her number but he got the unavailable tone and he knew that she would have pulled the SIM card out. She was gone. Maybe he could find her; he had the skills to find people even if they didn't want to be found but he didn't want her by coercion. He wanted her to want him. She didn't. He would have to deal with that however he could. He slouched back down the hill, tears on his face that he was too miserable to be embarrassed by. He packed mechanically, paid his bill and went to Rome, not even leaving a note for Giorgio. By seven the next morning he was at Archie and Veronica’s place in Brooklyn, the most unhappy he had ever been.

He took out a short lease on the place in the Bronx so the newly-wed Lodge-Andrews family could have their couch back and worked a few undemanding assignments stateside. He rode his bike too fast. He smoked too much. He bought a bottle of vodka and then poured all of it down the sink. He even went out and got laid a couple of times. Nothing distracted him. He felt like he couldn’t breathe when he thought about never seeing her again. He felt cold all the goddamn time. Archie was worried. "You never get like this over a girl Jug. What the hell dude?" He gestured to the half eaten burger that Jug had abandoned on his plate. He had to admit that it was uncharacteristic. "Either get over her or get her back, man. This is no good."

Eventually he gave in to the inevitable and dragged out the files and the notebooks. He started to work the story. He tried to treat it like a professional assignment but all the time he was aware that maybe if he could solve this mystery it might one day bring her back to him. He followed the leads, from the indiscrete publisher to the grieving mother, from the corruptible movie producer to the fake heir and then to Charles, the pseudocide himself.

He supposed that an ostensibly unprovoked broken nose inflicted on a homeowner by a stranger when he opened his own front door might have landed him in some trouble if said homeowner hadn’t immediately reached for an illegal and unregistered weapon. Jug was savvy enough to punch him again, harder, in the same spot when he saw the gun and Chic went down, unconscious, on the doormat. Jug pulled out his phone with the hand that he hadn't broken with the punch, called his attorney and then 911, kicking the unconscious man into some semblance of the recovery position so he didn't drown in his own blood. He told the dispatcher that he had apprehended a wanted felon who had threatened him with a firearm. They still cuffed him, because that was a thing the cops enjoyed, but his lawyer had talked him out of worse jams and he was free to go later that day. He headed directly to the New York Times to see if he could sell them something to appear in the morning edition so that he didn’t forfeit the exclusive. They agreed to buy his freelance piece if they could do follow up interviews and he spent the rest of the time until the presses rolled getting the essential facts into a neat two thousand words, typing left handed, his right resting on a chilled soda can. Before he went to sleep he called Mrs McCleod. He didn’t want her to have to read about this in the paper. He couldn’t tell if her tears were fear or relief, anger or joy. She said she was packing a bag to travel to New York to be with her son and he marvelled at the unconditional love that this mother showed for her boy when compared to the total disregard his mother always showed him. Perhaps he was just unloveable, he thought self pityingly. Betty had certainly seemed to have no trouble leaving him behind.

He slept in the next day, pretty much exhausted by the whirlwind he'd been caught up in. At twelve his phone buzzed on the nightstand. It was the crime desk editor at the Times. “You happy with that Jones? Page two, not too shabby for a freelance.” Jug hadn’t even known. He’d have to go and buy a copy for his dad. FP loved to see his boy’s name in print, even though he probably would have preferred him to eschew the nickname that went with it. 

“Hey, that’s great Callum. Thanks. Yeah, a good result.”

"Always room for you on the staff you know. Just say the word."

"Oh I'm not sure pal. I might be relocating. It's all kind of up in the air. But thanks." 

“Sure thing. Listen man, we’ve been getting a lot of calls from a girl who wants to reach you. Obviously we aren’t going to give out your information but she’s been driving us crazy all day. What do you want us to do? She says her name is Donna, Donna Americana? Sounds like a stripper.”

“Fuck, have you got her number? Callum? Have you?”

“Yeah, somewhere. Where the fuck did I put it? Christ this place is a dump. Ah here you go.”

He gave Jug the number and as soon as the call ended he was keying it in. It went direct to an anonymous voice mail. “Betty? Betts? Is this you? Fuck, ring me back Betty. Please. Call me. It’s Jug. Betty I’m fucking in love with you. Please. Call me.”

As he ended the call he thought about deleting the message and rerecording it with something smooth and casual but he decided that if she didn’t want him or was freaked out by him loving her then they probably didn’t have too much to talk about. He paced the apartment for a couple of hours, icing his hand when he thought about it then went to the bodega to buy a few copies of the Times for FP and Jellybean, came back, paced some more and finally realised that he was just waiting for her to call. What if she never did? Would his whole life be in limbo like this? He decided to ride down to Archie’s construction site in Brooklyn to see if he wanted to grab a beer after work. He was halfway there when his phone rang and he pulled over to answer.

“Jug, Jug, is that you?” It was her. His heart was ricochetting around in his chest like some trapped animal, trying to break out by rising into his throat or sinking into his belly.

“Betts? It’s me. Where are you? Fuck, where did you go?” He could hear the whine of an abandoned child in his voice and he tried to control himself. Fucking mommy issues.

“I’m at JFK. Are you in New York? I love you. I’ve been going crazy. Can you come get me?”

He was pulling the helmet on before he’d even ended the call, fumbling the phone with his bruised hand and yelling into it. “On my way. Thirty minutes.”

He felt like he was the shlubby hero in one of those romantic comedies where the guy has to get to the airport to declare his love to stop his girl flying out to marry some other guy except that his girl was flying in to get him and he’d already declared his feelings to her goddamn voicemail. He ran into the terminal, spinning around looking for her, reaching for his phone to call and then there she was, waving and dragging her suitcase towards him, grinning and crying at the same time and then in his arms as she should always have been. He held her by the shoulders and pushed her back so he could look at her, cool green eyes, blonde hair in a pile on top of her head, legs for days, his Betts. She reached out and pushed his hair back from his eyes and then stood on her toes to kiss him and then whisper, “This is very romantic but you know I’m not subtle. Let’s go to bed.”

They put her case in a cab and she point blank refused to get in with it even though he teased her that she thought bikes were death traps. Still they rode the bike back to the Bronx in plenty of time to beat the luggage home. He dragged it up the stairs to the postage stamp sized apartment and threw it into the bedroom. “Do you want coffee? Water? Food? A beer?”

“Just you at the moment please.”

“OK, that’s a given. But Betty I’m a journo, I need to know how you’re here. What happened?”

“Quick version pre-sex. I have a friend in the city, Kev. He’s the only person who has always known where I am. He saw the headline in the Times and called me, told me that Chic was alive, in jail, that the story was broken by one Forsythe "Jughead" Jones. My lady parts exploded with gratitude and lust and wanted me to bring them here to make their feelings known to you in person. I made a nuisance of myself calling the paper and some guy said he'd pass on the message when you came in next so I thought you must be in the city. I just got on a flight. It's very expensive when you just turn up, you know. I’m sorry I left Cantalupo without saying anything but I’d made a mistake. I couldn't stop thinking about you and I thought that if I made love to you that I'd get it out of my system and then we’d just go our separate ways. Afterwards, I realised that I absolutely couldn’t. If I saw you again there was no way I'd be able to let you go. And I couldn’t see how it could work. You have a career here, I couldn’t be here. Once you’d written the book the world would know where I was, even more so if you were there too, and I couldn’t handle that. I certainly wasn’t going to ask you not to write it. I could hardly tell you that because I'd given you the gift of my secret treasure that you had to give up your work and your whole damn life and stay with me in some kind of sexual slavery."

"I totally would have taken that deal," he grinned at her.

"Whatever. Anyway I ran again. It’s getting to be a habit I guess. Because I knew that if you asked me to do something, anything, that I’d do it. And I kind of suspected that if I asked you, you would too. I even got rid of my phone so I couldn't weaken and call you. I’m a fool for you Jones. Now, will you please, for the love of all that is holy, take me to bed?”

It was different from the first time because they were both slightly overwhelmed with feelings that they needed to express. Last time there had been desire and affection and regard for each other but the time apart had driven home the fact that their emotions ran much deeper than they had expected. He had to keep reminding himself that he mustn’t propose to her while he was screwing her, that shit was not gentlemanly. He got her undressed in about ten seconds and he was naked five seconds later. He tried to get his hand between her legs but before he could she was on her knees in front of him. She looked up at him, through her hair which he had messed up when he was kissing her and said “Please, I really want to. I’ve been fantasising about this,” and his knees almost gave way. She put her hands on his thighs first and began to kiss his hips and his belly, then she was cupping him in her hand, kissing him so tenderly that he thought it might make him cry and then, like it was nothing, she was sucking him, bringing him deeper that he had imagined she could, making a buzzing sound in her throat that seemed to make everything more intense and he had his hands in her hair, holding her as gently as he could, letting her set the pace, finally coming like he never had in his life, yelling with the ecstasy of it, feeling it in his toes and the roots of his hair. He just fell backwards onto the bed as if unconscious, muttering “Fuck, fuck, fuck,” under his breath.

He used his uninjured hand to bring her off as they lay on the bed, slowly, relaxed together, they even talked as he touched her, her replies interspersed with soft moans and little gasps when his touch was especially pleasurable. As she became more and more turned on he increased the intensity of his ministrations until he slid down to kiss her upper thighs, finally using his tongue in the place of his fingers, deep inside her, reaching up a hand to pinch her nipple as hard as he dared until she screamed and trembled and came apart for him.

He prepared some food but somehow he found himself thrusting into her as she leaned across the kitchen counter before they could eat, he ran her a bath which led to a soaked floor when she straddled him in the tub. They seemed unable to stop. Eventually, exhausted, they lay wrapped in each other, naked on the couch, a blanket over them, some dumb action film on the TV, whispering their love and exchanging soft touches and kisses.

Three days later, finally emerging like butterflies from their sex chrysalis, they went for brunch at the Lodge-Andrews house, Betty’s friend Kevin joining them and making himself an indispensable part of the group immediately. V was as direct as always. “So, sweetest love birds. What now? You aren’t going to make each other craycray again by parting are you?”

“Oh please don’t ever spend a night apart. I honestly cannot listen to her telling me how she misses all the intimate details of what he does to her ever again. It’s graphic.” Kev was laughing but Archie was looking a little nauseous at this thought. They were more or less brothers after all.

“We’re going to my place in Umbria until the fall to write. I have to finish...oh fuck it...I have to finish ghost writing an autobiography for the most vapid woman on the planet, making her seem deep and intriguing. No, don’t ask me I can’t tell you, even her first initial would give it away,” she was much less coy about her ghost writing career now that she didn’t have to rely on the discretion of the celebs to protect her from the press hyenas. 

“And I’m writing the book about Chic. Then back so Betts can finish up her last year at NYU and finally get the degree. Then who knows?”

“Speaking of psycho Chic, what’s happening with him?” Kev asked.

Betty had spoken to the lead detective that morning. “He's even scarier than we thought. He's trying to make a deal so he's admitted that he killed the guy in my mom's living room. Apparently he assumed that she'd never roll over because she'd do anything to protect me. So when she led the cops to the dump site he was pretty surprised. He hadn't realised that I was only the spare daughter. He knew it was only a matter of time before they linked the dead guy to him and came calling so he needed to press reset. It turns out that on the book tour he was cruising NA meetings, they have witnesses who talked to him, said he was being creepy, trying to befriend guys who looked like him. It seems that he finally found a recovering addict who bore a passing resemblance to him, some guy who was putting his life back together. Chic asked him to be his sponsor of all things, come with him on the next stage of the tour to help him stay clean. He ODed the guy in his sleep and just slipped the corpse into his identity. He'd become someone else many times so he became Greenleaf and just shipped a stranger off in a closed casket for his own mom to grieve and bury. So two counts of homicide, along with fraud, perjury, being a total piece of garbage. Let's hope he'll go down for a long time."

In the next few months Jug came to realise that loving someone, entirely and completely, and being loved by them in return is a special, different sort of thrill to the ones he'd found before. He discovered that he didn't need to dodge bullets in war ravaged cities or ride his motorcycle too fast on winding mountain roads, he still did sometimes but he didn't need it anymore. He also understood that he had a duty to take care of something that Betty loved and that something was himself. He had days that he once would have thought of as boring but which now seemed like perfect jewels in his life.

On the one year anniversary of the day they met, they slept late, waking to make love as sunlight slanted through the wooden shutters and spilled brilliance across the bed. Then they slept again, her hair laying across his chest like silk, her head resting on his shoulder. Later they walked to a bar near their home on the outskirts of Todi, another hilltop town, this time in Umbria an hour or so from Cantalupo. They sat at an outdoor table under a shade canopy to drink their coffee and read the newspapers, Betty helping with Jug’s Italian when he came across an unfamiliar word and laughing when he misconstrued a sentence. They wandered through the market, choosing vegetables for the meal they were cooking that evening. They worked a little in the afternoon, Betty correcting galleys, Jug rejecting suggestions from his editor. She watered their garden as the day became a little cooler, humming softly as she walked between the plants. He watched her through the window as he began to salt slices of eggplant to make an unfamiliar vegan meal for their young guests. At seven thirty there was the comical squeak of a scooter's horn and Gio called out loudly to them from the street. “Signora Betty, Jughead mio amico, come and meet my beautiful girl.” They stepped outside, arm in arm, as Gio said to the beautiful young woman next to him, “Carissa these are my dear friends. Ti ameranno come io ti amo. Did you understand Jughead?”

Jug put his arms around them both. “Of course. Parlo bene l'italiano. Amo, ami, amiamo...You told her that we'll love her as you love her. É vero Carissa. Welcome to our home.”


End file.
